There have been a variety of fastening devices for fastening, clamping, or gripping substantially flat articles such as sheet material or the like. Such fastening devices can include clipboards, staples, paper clips and the like for holding, fastening or clamping a plurality of sheets, fabric, paper or other material. Clips can also be used to fasten one item to another, attach one item to another or hand one item to another.
In particular it is well known to employ staples as well as paper clips to bold sheets of paper together such as the standard metal oblong-shaped paper clip or the metallic clamping paper clip having two pressure bearing legs that must be separated to insert paper there between. Such metal paper clips and staples can damage paper.
Moreover a piece of paper can inadvertently get snagged in the prior art oblong-shaped paper clip which is attached to other papers and thereby be incorrectly filed.
Furthermore many paper clips do not get used as paper clips particularly the wire paper clips which often get extended to clean articles or bent out of shape in a mechanical form of doodling.
These and other prior art devices such as the spring wire clip formed from spring steel wire having a triangular head with a pair of forwardly and inwardly extending legs have been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,013.
Moreover U.S. Pat. No. 4,440,374 relates to a resilient clip for supporting elongated articles where a base has an integrally formed flexible arm.
Another arrangement is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,056,197 which relates to a clip of extruded plastic material.
Yet other plastics clips are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,400,483 while U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,682 relates to a clamp comprising a U-shaped body having a web and two legs for clamping paper sheets.
Other clip arrangements are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,479,682, 6,260,244 which relates to a plastic clip; U.S. Pat. No. 6,163,934 which illustrates a multi-purpose paper clip; U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,850 which shows a clip for sheets of paper, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,214,825 which illustrates a paper clip with multiple panels.
Clips have also been used to bind paper together as shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,758,902, 5,542,708, 5,626,432, 4,174,910 and 5,320,456.
Other arrangements are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,612,532 B1, 6,374,463 B1 and 5,845,889.
It is an object of this invention to provide an improved paper clip which is easy to manufacture and use.